Curators’ Assistant

Curators of the 2nd edition

Basak Senova (Istanbul)

TIME CUBE

If we’re built from Spirals while living in a giant Spiral, then is it possible that everything we put our hands to is infused with the Spiral?

Our thoughts concerning a spatial metaphor for chronology is based on our movements on a front and back axis and we accordingly treat future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind . However, according to the ancient Greek conception, time was a circle where everything would come back to its start. Relatively, as the cognitive mapping of the Aymara people of South America suggests, the past is ahead and the future is behind. In any case, a sequence of time is remembered and told through attached and linked objects, subjects, and locations. Sequences have orders, yet, the act of remembering re-orders sequences either by eliminating some them or through the differing perceptions of chronology. Regardless of constructed histories and collective memories, remembering means jumping from one sequence to another.

The same logic indicates there are one or more readings inscribed in all of the journeys of remembering. Each reading guides towards a new reality and each reality illuminates a new path to discover curves, waves, missing details, obscured secrets, and disguised opinions. Readings of the past. Reminiscent of future memories. In the act of remembering, the odyssey becomes deeper and the narratives twist even more when the variables are constantly changing to anchor a memory. We jump from one sequence to another, sometimes back and forth, and sometimes by spinning in spirals.

By navigating through sequences of time, the Time Cube project aims at dwelling in past and future memories by (i) reconstructing narratives; (ii) experiencing diverse realities simultaneously; (iii) connecting the temporal with the spatial; and (iv) processing the evidences of fiction and fact together.

The central object of Time Cube is “Facility D-0, Tito’s Atomic War Command” located in Konjic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was built (from the 1950s through the 1970s) as a shelter for the Yugoslav Army headquarters. It was designed to protect hree hundred fifty chosen ones from possible nuclear fallout. Now, this very object still stands as a unique fiction, which is also a pastiche of industrial aesthetics and machinery with working engines and ventilators as the backdrop of a historical fact. The bunker simply freezes time and is totally isolated from the outer world. At the same time, the bunker unfolds all the possible tensions, disappointments, dreams, hopes, and miseries of the entire region.

This curiously fascinating project intends to detect evidences of past and future memories by challenging accredited perspectives of history with artistic projects. Research-based projects form the spine of this intention by shaping the project through their own expedition. In due course, Time Cube is open to accidents and coincidences through juxtapositions, intersections, and connections with other projects and art works that are concurrently presented in the bunker.

Branko Franceschi (Zagreb)

THE CASTLE

K., who had half-risen and smoothed his hair, looked at the people from below and said:
“What village have I wandered into? So there is a castle here?”
Franz Kafka, The Castle, 1926

In fact, there is no village and no castle. But, amidst the picturesque mountains and gorges of Bosnia and Herzegovina adorned with citadels and castles remnants of its warfare past, fake village houses hide the entrance to the ARK D-0 bunker. Built during the Cold War era the bunker represents the modern inversion of the medieval emanation of military and political power. Instead of crowning mountain peaks with elaborate stone construction that provide bird’s eye vistas of the ruled lands below, ARK D-0 might is embedded in solid rock hundred meters below the surface, its electronic protrusions scan wide and far, secrecy and invisibility being its main assets. Yet, the essence remains the same. ARK D-0 was conceived and built to preserve political and military elite from the perils of war and to maintain it in power long after the populace – the sole reason of elite’s existence and the fundament of its power – has been annihilated in the nuclear blast. The well lit, airy, bleak and austere interior of mirrored shape with countless rows of corridors, plain doors opening into cells and billets of dated yet once state-of-the art technology, represents military functionalism of survival at the highest attainable level. It also reeks of paranoia, egotism of totalitarian rule, and misuse of public funds from international creditors, indebting future generations. At the end, the complex social structure ARK D-0 was built to protect from the long range missiles falling from above, crumbled from within. The memories of its mighty, loved and feared leaders inevitably started to fade away. The facility itself was saved from the preprogrammed red-button ignited detonation doom thanks to the brave trick of a single military official. Though ARK D-0 ultimately failed, can we think of it as anything but the marketing tool of the contemporary tourism craze? Is there a salvation on the path from generals to tourist agencies?
The transgenerational group of artists, the witnesses, the prodigal, the heirs to the age of the Cold War paranoia facing contemporary challenges, will contribute their efforts to recur the enchanted atomic shelter to the visibility. They dare the authority, the undisputed, and the unquestionable. They will add a flash of vision, light and sound to the silent undead skeleton structure lurking in underground darkness. They will reflect complexities ARK D-0 stands for and they will bring it back to the people who paid for it, but for whom it was never built.